A typical enterprise-level computing environment can include many different types of computing resources (e.g., web servers, application servers, database servers, or other types of resource servers) which are intended to be accessed over a network (e.g., a company's internal Ethernet network, or the Internet) by other computers, or by users operating various different types of computing devices. A familiar example is the use of a client computer, such as a laptop equipped with a web browser application, by which a user can access a web server via the Internet.
Today's organizations rely increasingly on their computing resources being readily available from almost any location, at all times, with a high level of performance. The task of ensuring that such resources are allocated efficiently often requires the use of a load balancing device to distribute requests from clients to target resources, in a fair manner according to its distribution policies. These are the types of environments that embodiments of the invention can be used with.